The Books

The Books have kept active in the past four years  touring and releasing a DVD, as well as composing elevator music for Frances Ministry of Culture  but the bands been taking its sweet time when it comes to making a new album. The follow-up to 2005s Lost and Safe is said to be nearly finished, and the process has been understandably laborious  Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong famously take recycling to a whole new level by combing thrift stores for discarded cassette tapes, which are then culled and sampled in their music (all of which is mixed and mastered on their home PCs). Live performances are synched with a backdrop of videotape projections, which are, of course, more secondhand finds. The Books music is thus less a collection of songs and more a group of adventurous, overarching sound-and-speech collages, structured with mellifluous cello and guitar. Zammutos vocals may have to share face-time with speech clips of Einstein and Auden, but they are enticingly silky when they do appear. The combination of all these effects is euphonic and truly otherworldly  its the music you hear in your dreams. 7 p.m. show all ages. E. THOMPSON